


Burning the Letters

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Not a Happy Story, You might hate Dean by the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 02:55:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam leaves behind three letters to a stranger.  Dean reads them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning the Letters

**Author's Note:**

> Written November 2008 for a challenge at the LJ comm. spnmysteryyears to the prompt: _a few months after Sam leaves, Dean finds a letter. (To Sam? From Sam? A bundle of them left like a confession, or a single one forgotten in a rush of packing? Up to you...) Sam/OMC ._ Stanford-era darkfic.

Sam’s been gone three months when Dean decides it’s time to get rid of the last of his brother’s stuff.  What Sam had left wasn’t much—a couple of torn shirts, a pair of jeans he’d outgrown, a dog-eared paperback or three, the gaping space he’d once occupied, which Dean knows doesn’t really echo like a cavern as he talks across it to his father.

 

It’s when he’s tossing out a copy of _The Catcher in the Rye_ that the first one falls out, fluttering to the floor and waiting there, half-open, for Dean’s hand.

 

He’s curious, figures it’s just school notes, opens it.

 

The lined paper is covered in his brother’s strong hand, and another hand squeezes around Dean’s heart to see it.  There’s honesty in the sharp lines of his brother’s hand, the cheap blue ball-point ink somehow assertive, and he can almost hear Sammy’s voice in his head, insisting on something.

 

Probably that Dean shouldn’t read it at all.

 

But when he sees the first words, he can’t help but keep reading, and he tells himself it doesn’t matter because Sam isn’t coming back, and anyway, it’s his brother’s own damn fault for leaving the books behind where anyone could pick them up.

 

Reading it through is like an exhaled breath after long waiting, and Dean feels relief.

 

He isn’t the one to blame for Sam leaving, and maybe Dad isn’t, either.  

 

There’s no beginning, like maybe there’d been an earlier page, lost now, or secreted in some book Sam did take.  

_How could you?  I trusted you.  I trusted you with my body, my heart, everything. And you threw that away for some guy you met in a bar?  I guess that’s what I get for letting you know how I really felt.  I guess you couldn’t handle it._

“Sammy, you sly dog,” Dean intones, smiling a wicked little smile.  “Knew you were just playing the virgin all that time.”  He tries to ignore the little stab of hurt that Sam had one more big secret he kept from Dean before leaving, keeps reading with the smile a little strained now but holding.

_  
But you pushed and pushed.  You asked me what was wrong, why I was acting so weird all of a sudden._

_And I thought you loved me.  Like that, I mean.  Like I love ~~d you.~~_

_I was a fool, and I won’t be a fool again.  Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.  Something Dad used to tell me all the time._

_I should’ve listened to him.  God, I should’ve listened to you when you said it wasn’t going to work._

_Worst of it is, I can’t hate you.  I can’t.  You’re too much a part of my life._

_I’m so glad I’m going away._

_Always,_

_Sam_

 

At the end of it, Dean wishes he could call Sam and tease him about what a girl he is, how he must’ve had the emo meter turned up to eleven when he wrote this.  

 

He spares a thought for the girl who broke his brother’s heart, wonders if she was hot, wonders what it was like for Sam to give her his body.  Seems like something a brother should hear about, but then, towards the end there, they hadn’t talked much.

 

Shaking away the thought even as he flips through the pages of the book for any more secrets, Dean finds he’s a little disappointed and a little relieved to see that the book is otherwise empty.  

 

Chucking it toward the metal basket in the corner, he picks up the second, which is missing its cover and the title pages, so that it begins with, “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country.”

 

“Who reads this crap?” He snorts and leafs through the pages, telling himself he’s not really looking for more _Secret Diaries of Sammy_.  But the smell of old book, which he’s long associated more with Sam than Dad, catches him by surprise, and he has to throw the volume hard against the wall before he can get rid of the sick feeling that crept on him at the memory.

 

A loose sheet bursts from the binding as the book strikes the wall, and it settles like an accusation in the center of the mattress.

 

Dean doesn’t hesitate to read this one.

 

The first words send a chill down his back and he has to sit down on the mattress edge and rest his elbows on his knees to keep his hands from shaking so much that the motion blurs the words.

 

Again, there’s no salutation, but Dean can sort of see why, now.

_That night…I want you to know that I cried not because it hurt.  It did hurt.  It hurt a lot.  You were drunk, and you weren’t that experienced, either, and I get that.  I mean, I know you didn’t mean to hurt me._

_But that’s not why I cried._

_I cried because it was something I wanted so badly, and I finally had it, and despite the whiskey breath and the post-coital vomiting, you were still the best thing to ever happen to me._

_I felt like I’d been given a gift I hadn’t even dared to ask for._

_I know I sound like a girl.  I don’t care._

_I miss you._

_But I don’t care about that, either._

_No, that’s a lie.  But then, you’re used to lies, so mine shouldn’t be any surprise._

_Always,_

_Sam_

 

He drops the letter like it’s contaminated and raises his hands—no doubt about the shaking now—to cover his face.

 

Dean doesn’t feel sorry for the cocksucking asshole who hurt his brother anymore.

 

Mostly, he feels like taking the guy out back behind some bar, emptying piss-warm beer over his head and then using the broken bottle to do a little number on the guy’s lying face.

 

Who does the prick think he is, fucking his brother and then fucking him over?  

 

Sam’s worth so much more than that.

 

Dean’s surprise that Sam is gay takes a distant second place to his indignation over the way his brother’s lover must’ve treated him, and it takes him a long time, longer than maybe he’d be comfortable admitting, to get past visions of what he wants to do to the unnamed man who took Sammy’s virginity and then trashed his heart.

 

At last, he retrieves the book from behind the bedstead, stripping the pages off in tens and twenties, feeling something inside of himself let go at the tearing sound they make as they come away from the glue.  When the book is nothing but a tornado of yellowed pages in a spiral up the sides of the can, Dean drops the binding in, too, and picks up the third book.

 

He doesn’t bother to see what it is, even if he does stare for a long, long time at the cover.  Later, and ever after, he’d remember that it was a somber portrait of some ugly woman looking solemn yet strangely rebellious, the red at the center of her chest like a badge of honor.

 

Eventually, he opens it and begins a slow crawl through the pages.  One by one by one he turns them, his heart loud in his ears, like he’s turning a hallway corner in a darkened house, unsure of what he’ll find when he gets around it.

 

He finds it near the end, folded over on itself and shoved in against the binding hard enough that he has to tug a little to get it loose.

 

What he reads drops Dean to his knees on the dirty brown carpet, and he feels a rushing quiet come over him, like the silence after the suffocating snow has broken over him, sealing him in a slow tomb.

_I’m leaving._

_You._

_I’m leaving you._

_I’m leaving because you’ll never not be ashamed of me, of us, of what we have._

_You’ll never stop looking for something you aren’t in dive bars, and you’ll never stop bringing home your mistakes to try to prove to us both that you aren’t gay or that you really don’t love me like that or whatever it is that you’re trying to tell yourself._

_You’ll never stand up to Dad and tell him that I’m yours, always, and I don’t deserve to be treated like the second class son he’s always thought I am._

_You’ll never look at me and see only Sam your lover, not Sam the naïve kid who doesn’t know what he really wants.  Not Sam the disappointment who can’t quite live up to what’s expected of him._

_But mostly, I’m leaving because I love you so much I think it might kill me if I don’t go._

_I can hear you now telling me that I’m being overdramatic.  I can practically feel you slapping me on the shoulder like one of the guys and saying, “Don’t be such a girl, Samantha.”_

_Later, you’d get drunk and then get on your knees and show me you love me, but that’s only your way of not having to say a word because your mouth is full._

_After that, you’d forget all about it, or pretend to, like I’m just a bad taste in your mouth and nothing more._

_I know how it works now.  I think I understand._

_This will kill us, you before me.  You’ll find a way to die if I don’t walk away._

_Already, you act like you don’t know me, like you never knew me.  Already I’ve become another memory you’d rather not drag out into the light._

_You hunt things you like more than what we’ve become._

_I love you.  And I’d die for you.  But I won’t let you do the same for me._

_Goodbye._

_Sam_

The retching only stops when he has nothing left to bring up, when his hands are wet at the edges from lying flat against the pooling sickness that’s come out of him.

 

The stench makes him heave again, but he doesn’t care.  It’s nothing close to what he deserves, he figures, now that he knows.

  
Knows why Sammy left them.  Him.  

 

Knows why Sammy towards the end there wouldn’t look him in the eye.

 

Knows, finally, what Sammy’s last words at the bus station about love must have meant.

 

Later, a lot later—it’s dark, and only the vague blue glow of the old microwave by the stove gives him any light—Dean gets up and turns on the stove’s only working gas burner.

 

He listens to the lighter snap-snap-snap, smells that clean odor of gas before it burns, thinks of all the hunts when that smell signaled something taking its long, last sleep, and considers letting go of the switch and then letting go altogether.

 

Finally, though, a flame flares blue, then an orange ring that reminds him, strangely, of a sacred circle meant to protect.

 

The letters flutter in the heat like the wings of a desperate and pathetic bird.

 

He hesitates, holding in his hand the evidence of their mutual undoing, the final nail in the normal coffin that his brother must’ve clung to even after the first time, when Dean—

 

Memory bright behind his eyes, searing him, Dean sets the letters aflame.  They go up like unrestful spirits, but quietly.

 

He lets the flames lick at his fingers, ignores the sting and then searing pain, thinking that, for once, the trapped spirit freed himself without any of Dean’s help.  

 

He isn’t exorcising anything by burning these.  Sam’s already gone, putting together a life that doesn’t have Dean in it.

 

The only monster here is Dean himself.  

 

He’ll have to work up the courage to burn.  

 

 

 

 


End file.
